It's almost the season for New Year's Resolutions. Which I suck at. Not making them, but in keeping them. The changes I've been most successful with were the ones I didn't announce publicly and just...did. So...I have plans. Resolutions, call them. But I'll announce them after the fact. Ex post facto.

Speaking of sloppy Latin, let's look at what happened to the corpse that was November.

First of all, NANWRIMO didn't happen. I did get out to write with the Wordslingers almost every Saturday. Which is good, because that's almost all the writing I got done. So what went wrong?

Well, I went on vacation at the beginning of the month, that was 5 days gone. (Vegas is VERY nice in November, just in case you want to escape the cold but don't want to bake out every pore. Just bring a lot more lip balm that you think you'll ever need. And drink more water.)

When I got back, I got slammed into the pre-release work cycle for the Kind Fire HD updates. Rabble. By the time that calmed down, It was the middle of the month.

Then there was Thanksgiving, which turned out to be more family-oriented and less 'hiding in my library, writing'-oriented.

But the real culprit? Games. Role playing games for one, I got roped into GMing a Superhero campaign again and then there's the IM gaming that I've been using to stay sane.

But the real monster was/is computer games. I spent over 80 hours....let me say that again, in bold, 80 HOURS playing video games this month. Just imagine how much writing that could have been. No, don't bother, I'll imagine it for you. It's a lot.

Games and gaming are the number one thing keeping me from writing like a professional, instead of writing as a hobby.

So, problem identified. So now what?

I don't know but I have some...things that I'm...resolved on.

Other writing news, I sent out one story, got two rejections. Slow, bad month for me. See above. But I'm still holding strong hope that one of my stories might be my first Pro sale. I haven't heard 'no' yet and it's getting close. Here's hoping.

One of the Wordslingers, the lovely and talented (and I'm not just saying that) Heather Rouolo

Norwescon is also drawing its line in the sand for submissions to their writing workshop. I've decided to send out 3 chapters for Smooth Vengeance, since they're in better shape than most of the short stories I've written in the last few months. Today the Wordslingers are critiquing it, tomorrow, I send it out.